palou said:
Zkuq said:
For most people, that is probably just not true. People are far from logical. They might seem logical at first glance but a closer look often reveals contradictions. I try to avoid them personally by adjusting my views to be consistent, but being human, I'm not sure it's even possible to achieve a logically consistent whole in practice. Following your 'why' route, I might be able to come up with some so-called axioms, but if I were to try to find all of my so-called axioms, I'd be surprised if at least some of them weren't contradicting each other in some way. Obviously correcting them might be possible, but it complicates things a lot. Life is complex, and breaking it down to a set of axioms I can really trust seems either ridiculously difficult or impossible. I can probably quite easily find a lot of general guidelines I feel very strongly about, but to call them axioms? No way. Perhaps in the context of this discussion, you'd be ready to call those general guidelines axioms due to how strongly I feel about them, but I'm definitely not.
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It's not about how strongly you feel about them, it's simply the fact that you would be unable to justify them any further that makes them an axiom. Mathematicians don't feel anything, at all, about their axioms - just say that in the context that the following are true, and make their conclusions there on out. Note also that an axiom doesn't necessarily have to be true (or rather, they are automaticaly true, by their own definition) in any context, just non-contradictory with other axioms. They also don't have to be complete, it's fine if they can't resolve some problems (note that it's technically impossible for a set of axioms to be both complete and coherent.)
I use a cheap cop-out, only 1, fairly weak, axiom. No contradictions, but really limited capacity to evaluate situations.
I'd be interested in hearing what these not-axioms you carry around are, though.
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I know what an axiom is, and I'm glad we're on the same page about them. I just don't believe it's even possible to get to such personal axioms you're suggesting because of human nature unless you accept that those axioms can change - in which case they probably can't even be called axioms. Anything I might consider an axiom at any point of time during my life could change later on because of a change in thinking. For example, one might think that no person has the right to take another's life, but it might not be that difficult to sway a person's opinion to be more positive about death sentence in regard to certain serious crimes. It's possible that certain thoughts can be reduced to simple axioms, but at the same time, there's probably a humongous amount of things that can only be reduced to strong beliefs that are still subject to change.
I strongly believe in human rights, yet it's difficult to define human rights precisely. Some human rights are commonly accepted, but some are more questionable and it's hard to say whether they should be considered human rights - or where to draw the limits. For example, I consider privacy to be more or less a human right, but I'm not sure I can define to what extent. Obviously it can't be defined to apply fully in all cases (for example criminal investigation), but where is the line then? I'm not sure if liberty is considered a human right, but it's something I value highly that suffers from the same problem as privacy: To what extent can it be expected? To me, it's all a huge mess that's about balancing the different aspects so that no single aspect can dominate the rest just to keep the whole system self-consistent.
If I had even one axiom, it could potentially endanger other things I find valuable just to keep things consistent with the axiom. However, if I can simply change the axiom if it causes problems, how can you even call it an axiom? Thus, it seems that if there's even one axiom, there must be a whole system of them, which every single view a person can have can be derived from. I'm not convinced you can, in practice, come up with such a comprehensive system, especially in a way that doesn't contradict itself. I wouldn't be surprised if, given any two personal 'axioms', it would be possible to come up with a contradiction between them. I'm not saying that's the case, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.